Here we go...

Alright guys, this is my one third progress of my piece! Well at least I believe I'm at least one third of the way through my piece...

I'm a little unsure mainly because I have a tendency to go back and rework elements of my pieces. This project in particular requires lots of thought into the color, factors such as the lighting greatly affect what the final piece will look like and I've been careful when choosing which colors to place down as my bases. For now I am happy with how the colors look but I would not be surprised if I changed my mind later and that would definitely set me back in my progress. So far though I have been having fun creating my piece. Something that I have not done much of is architecture but I've found that I like the structure that's involved in the process. To create the clean lines in the building I've been using masking tape and it is so satisfying to pull the tape off and see that crisp line! The panel itself is 4ft tall by 2ft wide and I primed it using both black & white gesso. I did this because some of the acrylic paints I use are less opaque than others so depending on the lighting decided whether I used the black or white gesso. For example, if the area is meant to be in shadow I backed it in black.

Since my project is in it's beginning phase I got in a group of my fellow students and we had a critique. One of the major things we talked about was expanding the format of my piece. Since my piece is a basic flat rectangle I wanted to look for more ways to make the piece visually more interesting. Some of the ideas we generated was creating outlying floating pieces to place in the installment. Their main purpose was to expand upon the dimensions of the original focus and add some more visual interest which could also be linked back to the idea of isolation that is part of the theme of the piece. If you have any other ideas to expand upon the theme I would love to hear about them!

Some new inspirations have made their way into my artistic process especially that of Hannah Melto's who I found on Instagram and Nan Goldin an artist prominent in the 80's. Hannah Melto has a series of pieces that she created over the month of October where she took real life images from her life in Tokyo and recreated them, putting pumpkin heads on all the people. This has quite a direct relation to my piece as I am also putting pumpkin heads on people.

Nan Goldin on the other hand is a photographer who throughout her career took many pictures of people and their self expression in the "age of drugs". Combined these two artists make up both the style and theme of my piece.